Trajal's Story

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One of the first people I met at the dance festival was Trajal. He is a choreographer from NYC, and is here at the festival taking part in an experimental program called ‘Adventure,’ where there are 8 or so choreographers and 4-ish instructors working on creating new means/ways of
producing work/contemporary dance. The 'Adventure' everyday together, 16 hour days, for five weeks with only one day off. Very intense.
I met Trajal at a wine party that was thrown for the Adventure group in conjunction with the DanceWeb folks, which is the program that Tommy was here taking part in.
Somehow we got on the topic of baseball (not a surprise, since many of my conversations with new people start off with ‘what do you do?’ or ‘what are you doing in Europe’? Since I was coming straight from Moscow, where I had been coaching baseball, my immediate response is ‘I am here for baseball’ or ‘I’m a baseball player’ or ‘I’m a baseball coach,’ but this response became very frustrating because I found that it would immediately end or slow down the conversation (with most people). Often they would say, ‘oh-‘ or ‘so you’re not a dancer’, giving me a smirk or a cute smile. One person’s response was ‘I knew you weren’t a dancer. I could tell.’
Eventually I changed my response to ‘I do theater,’ or ‘I’m an actor,’ which is true, and in fact for some reason I identify with that response more than I do the baseball response. And it has more concrete connotations when you say you are an athlete than if you say you are an artist.
Anyhow, Trajal was probably the first person who had a completely difference response to my answer to the question ‘what do you do?’ I told him I was a baseball player and he said, 'I have a story about baseball.’ And he proceeded to tell me the following story.

Trajal's father really wanted him to be a baseball player, he said. But from the moment he tried it, he knew it wasn’t for him. He was eight when he first joined a baseball league, and after one season he convinced his father that gymnastics was just as macho a sport, so his father let him sign up for gymnastics instead of baseball the following summer.
When Trajal was eleven, his father once again signed him up to play baseball. He was not happy about this. As he tells it, the final game of his short career came on one sunny afternoon; he was playing left field; ‘and I HATE left field’ he said. They always put him in the outfield, he said. (As a side note, I hate how in Little League many coaches put the weaker players in the outfield, a position that is pretty darn important). And in a single moment, Trajal decided that he was going to quit. So he walked off the field, in the middle of the game, the middle of the inning. He left the field, left the ballpark. He began walking through the city park that was host to the baseball field, and he came upon a crowd of youngsters milling around. They were backstage to a play, waiting to go on stage. Somehow Trajal got caught up with the kids (this is the part of the story that is sort of hazy), an adult walked up and began corralling the kids toward the stage. And Trajal followed.

This was Trajal’s first experience with performance/the stage, and his last experience with playing baseball.

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